King Holiday a launch pad for the revolutionaries

By the Council of Conservative Citizens, 21 January 1999

It's often said that it's necessary to know what your enemies are up to.
I think that has some validity.

But in this case, we can actually take some lessons and direction from our
enemies.

This excerpt was taken from a smear-job on Martin Luther King on the Council
of Conservative Citizens ( read white citizens council 90's style ) website.

http://www.cofcc.org/frames/francis.htm

"....A few months later, Robert Weisbrot, a fellow of the DuBois Institute
at Harvard, was writing in The New Republic (1/30/84) that "in all, the
nation's first commemoration of King's life invites not only celebration,
but also cerebration over his --- and the country's --- unfinished tasks."
Those "unfinished tasks," according to Mr. Weisbrot, included "curbing
disparities of wealth and opportunity in a society still ridden by caste
distinctions," a task toward the accomplishment of which "the reforms of the
early '60s" were "only a first step." Among those contemporary leaders
"seeking to extend Martin Luther King's legacy," Mr. Weisbrot wrote, "by far
the most influential and best known is his former aide, Jesse Jackson."

The exploitation of the King holiday for radical political purposes was even
further enhanced by Vincent Harding, "Professor of Religion and Social
Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver," writing in The
New York Times (1/18/88). Professor Harding rejected the notion that the
King holiday commemorates merely "a kind, gentle and easily managed
religious leader of a friendly crusade for racial integration." Such an
understanding would "demean and trivialize Dr. King's meaning." Professor
Harding wrote:

"The Martin Luther King of 1968 was calling for and leading civil
disobedience campaigns against the unjust war in Vietnam. Courageously
describing our nation as 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today,' he was urging us away from a dependence on military solutions. He
was encouraging young men to refuse to serve in the military, challenging
them not to support America's anti-Communist crusades, which were really
destroying the hopes of poor nonwhite peoples everywhere. This Martin Luther
King was calling for a radical redistribution of wealth and political power
in American society as a way to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical
care, jobs, education and hope for all of our country's people."

To those of King's own political views, then, the true meaning of the
holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political
agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American
social and cultural institutions --- not simply those that supported racial
segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an
anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains
the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power
for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth.

In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of
Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a
charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate
meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King's own
sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the
Declaration of Independence becomes a "promissory note" by which the state
is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission,
and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of
equality --- racial, cultural, national, economic, political and social ---
must be overcome and discarded.

By placing King --- and therefore his own radical ideology of social
transformation and reconstruction --- into the central pantheon of American
history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary
process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead.
Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon,
the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary
political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted
the symbol of the new dogma as a defining --- perhaps the defining --- icon
of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda
the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.

It is hardly an accident, then, that in the years since the enactment of the
holiday and the elevation of King as a national icon, systematic attacks on
the Confederacy and its symbolism were initiated, movements to ban the
teaching of "Western civilization" came to fruition on major American
universities, Thomas Jefferson was denounced as a "racist" and
"slave-owner," and George Washington's name was removed from a public school
in New Orleans on the grounds that he too owned slaves.

In the new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as
symbol, all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma
of equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with the
South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of the
egalitarian dogma and therefore must be the first to go, but they will by no
means be the last.

The political affiliations of Martin Luther King that Sen. Jesse Helms so
courageously exposed are thus only pointers to the real danger that the King
holiday represents. The logical meaning of the holiday is the ultimate
destruction of the American Republic as it has been conceived and defined
throughout our history, and until the charter for revolution that it
represents is repealed, we can expect only further installations of the
destruction and dispossession it promises....."